Verbing Weirds Language only if you're expecting it to work in a simple way. This is a special case of the more general truth that Language Weirds.

Only when a republic's life is in danger should a man uphold his government when it is in the wrong. There is no other time.

The church says Earth is flat; but I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more confidence in a shadow than the church.

If we can't find Heaven, there are always bluejays.

Sunday, August 12, 2012

The Week in Entertainment

DVD: Two more Shahrukh Khan films: Pardes (Foreign Land), in which an Indian girl comes to the US to marry the son of a millionaire NRI - and things don't work out as planned - and Hum Tumhare Hain Sanam (I am yours, darling), an uneven rom-com with a great SRK performance as a man who begins to fear that his beloved wife is actually in love with her childhood friend. Also Waqt (Time), with Amitabh Bachchan as a dying man trying to teach his son (Akshay Kumar) to be a responsible adult: tough love, Indian style. And finally watched Secondhand Lions, which has been on my stack of unwatched things for a while now, and found it utterly delightful.

TV: Leverage I love Elliot's "It's a very distinctive ---" and this one was great: "static." And Hardison and Parker are so cute together. Also, someone at the office told me to try Perception; it's intriguing. Hellfighters - I love this movie, I don't really know why. This was a horrible pan-and-scan, but I watched it anyway. One thing always gets me: at the end, when they're putting out the five fires in Venezuela, three so close that if they leave one burning it will reignite the others, Greg (Jim Hutton) says they successfully put out the other two at one go and "this setup is better because the wire runs [to the explosives] are closer to the same length." Every time I hear that, I think: you are aware you can cut the wires to whatever length you want, right? I mean, really. Watched Judge Dee - or, rather Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (Di Renjie zhi tongtian di guo). I've read the van Gulik books, and enjoyed the movie a lot though it's not based on them, but rather on the same stories they're based on - it's a fantastic detective story, with some pretty cool special effects. I'm guessing that it's in Chinese is why it didn't kill at the box office.

Read: Farewell, My Baboo, a very funny noir pastiche of Peanuts, with Linus as the gumshoe. Whimsy and Soda, a pastiche of Jeeves and Wooster - a collection of shorts, some very funny, some not so. The Patron Saint of Butterflies, about two girls raised in a cult and whether they can escape it - even if they leave. The Summer of May, in which a 12-year-old girl has to spend summer with the teacher she hates most, while adjusting (or not) to her mother's abandoning the family. And finished Tigers in Red Weather, which didn't end as I expected it to, and which turned out quite fascinatingly in the end. I'm still not sure I like most of the characters, but that doesn't seem to matter, as long as at least one of them grabs you, does it?

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About Me

I used to teach Russian and Ukrainian, and some basic English, to civil servants. Now I teach Russian at a local continued-learning institute. I dabble in Gaelic and Welsh. I'm am amateur photographer and I love birding (in a small way). I'm a Progressive, and a Freethinker, and I know Evolution is a fact - that's FCD, Friend of Charles Darwin (look down the sidebar). I read a lot, and follow women's college basketball. Also I love astronomy, though I'm a rank amateur at it. Most of all, I like living in the reality-based community...

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You cannot leave. You cannot drop the armor now. Why? Because you are needed, more than ever. You are mandatory to keep the energy flowing, the karmic vibrator buzzing, to keep the progressive and lucid half of the nation breathing and healthy and awake and ever reaching out to the half that's wallowing in fear and violence and homophobia and sexual dread, hoping to find harmony instead of cacophony, common ground instead of civil war, some sort of a shared love of a country so messy and internationally disrespected and openly confused its own president can't even speak the language.

After all, you don't hand over all your children the first time the flying monkeys bang on your door...

It's far from over. The tunnel is just a little darker -- and longer -- than we imagined.
Mark Morford